CorpComms Magazine

When Kent County Council recently banned workers from using Facebook in an effort to crack down on time-wasting, there was a mixed reaction from business.

 While some companies have embraced such sites as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo as motivational tools, other companies are drawing up plans to ban access to employees. It is easy to understand the latter group's rationale.

Employment law firm Peninsula Business Services estimates that 213 mn hours are lost every month as a direct result of employees 'wasting time' on social networking. The figures may be unsubstantiated, but it is undoubtedly true that the myriad new communication tools are taking up more and more time as workers stop to check their inbox or play on their BlackBerry.

There is also an increasing view that, while electronic communication devices prove a tremendous asset for international companies with far-flung workforces, something intangible can be lost. Apart from the obvious problem of an overloaded inbox and the time it takes to clear, there is the added dimension of a surfeit of superficial employee communication. In fact, in a report published last month, researchers from Paisley and Glasgow universities found office workers were checking for new messages as often as 30-40 times an hour.

'Email harries you,' explains Karen Renaud, lead researcher on the report. 'You want to know what's in there, so you break off what you are doing to read the email. The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you've lost your train of thought, making you less productive.'

Time to talk

But there is also the sense that communication in business is about much more than just conveying information about operations. It also needs to be about engagement, vision, innovation and st rategy. Steve Br idge f rom organisational consultants Sheppard Moscow is an experienced facilitator and teamwork specialist. He says when he facilitates a meeting, participants typically turn to their PDAs in the breaks between sessions 'when often the real issue they are facing is the relationships between them'.

The matters they are attending to via electronic communication might be important, but 'it can be a wasted opportunity to talk to people you rarely see,' Bridge explains. 'Quite often, their attention is elsewhere, including during a meeting. In some organisations it's almost standard practice for the laptop to be on the table during meetings, with people doing emails if they're not interested in the discussion. But the more understanding we have of ourselves and of each other, the more opportunity there is to be effective. Great collaboration is borne out of more than just having the right people in the right role.'

 This view is supported by Miles Flint, president of telecommunications company Sony Ericsson. 'Team members have to spend time together, eat together, relax together, before they will begin to say, This is the same problem in Japan that the guys in Sweden had,' he notes. 'It doesn't just happen by someone declaring, You are a team.' He adds that Sony Ericsson 'tends to resist cutting back on travel' because it wants to have real meetings between people working on globally distributed projects. When the company first introduced this policy, it invested considerable time in team building and developing shared understanding of different cultures.

While some observers may dismiss such investment as costly and unnecessary, Sony Ericsson is conscious of the many mergers and joint ventures that have ultimately failed. It believes investment in conversation could prove to be the most successful investment of all.

Wise words

Terry Pearce, president of Leadership Communications, is an author and specialist on the subject of business communication. He says some managers now acknowledge the need for creating space for deeper dialogue in major change programmes. 'I know people who spend as much - or even more - time on assessing the cultural fit in organisations as on making sure the merger or acquisition fits organisationally,' he asserts. 'This means asking, Do we have connections, values, relationships? If we don't, problems will be far greater than you might ever imagine.

'The basic problem is that people genuinely mistake the corporation for an entity when really that's just a legal creation. The organisation is the people. If you forget that, you're not interested in having conversations - you think the corporation runs itself, whereas of course it doesn't. When you turn that into a multicultural, multinational setting, the problems are multiplied. If people don't have trust, it doesn't matter what the organisation looks like.'

Conversations and the degree of mutual understanding must be proportional to the need, of course. Obviously, for straightforward transactional services, it is not necessary to spend hours together, understanding each others' needs and aspirations. On the other hand, for high-performance working in teams, where individuals need high levels of trust, it might be essential.

For an increasing number of teams, face-to-face conversations are difficult to arrange, because the members are in different countries. Globalisation has stretched teams around the world and often means individuals are in more than one group, including teams for temporary projects, or with outsourced providers and joint venture partners.

Pearce says there are no techniques, as such, to creating space for meaningful conversation; it's a question of making it a priority. 'Time is just a matter of commitment,' he says. 'We have to believe conversation is important. If you don't believe it's important, you won't do it.'

Pearce also believes it is not necessary to meet face-toface to have meaningful conversations, so being remotely located is no alibi for failing to make the time. A good telephone conversation is better than a poor face-to-face encounter, he adds, but there is likely to be more trust if you meet occasionally.

Meaningful gestures

Much communication is non-verbal, giving face-to-face meetings significant advantages. This is not just for the sake of personal relationships but also for hard business reasons. It can be much easier to gauge whether key players are genuinely committed to a new business proposal, for example, if you can see whether their eyes light up at the prospect or they seem distracted.

'I do feel we're crowding out opportunities for conversation,' comments Sue Turner, who recently stood down as human resources director at The Body Shop. 'A mistake that companies make is to think doing things quickly means doing lots of tasks. It's symbolic of 'command and control'-style management: you're the boss, you tell them what to do, you email them for a progress report.'

The problem is that an in-depth conversation can often feel like a luxury, especially in a fast-paced business sector. Yet in the retail sector, for example, successful executives make a point of engaging in unplanned conversations with people throughout the business.

The late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, 'would walk through the front door, without an agenda, without a planned meeting, and talk to people - just to find out what was going on', says Turner. 'By contrast, I can think of times sat around an executive table, discussing falling sales in the US market, and the conversation would only be about the macro-economic climate. There wouldn't be a discussion about the customer experience. You don't get the depth of understanding without face-to-face communication.' Simply turning off the mobile or ignoring the inbox is not an option.

But there is a real question to be answered on how the increasing range of communication media is used. The ability to call from a train or a distant airport increases the opportunities for meaningful and timely conversations. 'All these things have fantastic benefits,' says Bridge, 'but there are hidden risks.' Like Pearce, he believes companies are held together by relationships; management structures and communication media are just means to an end.

' It doesn't happen automatically,' Bridge adds. 'It needs attention. It may develop over time, and it will only develop if there is sufficient contact.' So next time a key colleague suggests a chat over coffee, perhaps instead of thinking 'That's nice!' or 'What a waste of time!', the thought should be: 'What can we get from that conversation - and what might be the risks in missing it?'

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